Saturday Waffling (March 29, 2014)

Hello faithful readers. I'm off traveling on a family engagement and forgot to queue one of these before I left, so am quickly banging this out on an iPad. So I'll be brief this week.

The engagement involves an unusually large amount of me cooking, and that venison post really did go over surprisingly well, and so let's go with that. Two questions. What's the best meal you've ever had, and are there any foods or food topics you'd really like to see me get around to covering some week, since apparently food posts are weirdly popular.

Best meal I ever had was half a bowl of tomato soup and a slice of bread and butter. I was recovering from adult measles and it was the first thing I'd been able to eat and keep down for days and days. Felt like being reborn.

I don't think I've ever had a "best meal", though there's some I can still remember a good while later.

For some reason, the best cheeseburgers I've ever had were at Mexican restaurants. Now, I know that sounds like a strange place to order a cheeseburger, but I speak the god's honest truth when I say there's just something that makes it turn out that way.

Likewise, my strong contender for best meal ever was a bowl of wonton soup prepared by a street vendor in a Shanghai night market. It was pouring rain, and we were perched on a "bench" that was just a wooden beam across two sawhorses under a plastic tarp. I had the single worst cold I'd ever had in my life (a common occurrence for first-time tourists in China), and the soup felt like pouring life back into an empty husk.

I've probably had better, but the favorite I can recall is my family's typical Sunday afternoon dinner- my dad prepares a nicely-seasoned steak, and my mom grills chicken. I typically have it with a side of applesauce and occasionally some garlic bread, and then some chocolate milk (as a kid I always drank chocolate milk at meals and for some reason have never grown out of it...it's particularly embarrassing when I go to somewhat higher-end restaurants and have to ask if they by any chance have chocolate milk).

I have particularly fond memories of having the meal every Sunday while we watched the latest Doctor Who episode (we did this throughout almost all of the back half of Series 7). It's a large part as to why that series is possibly my favorite in the new series- there's just something about that communal experience of watching and enjoying it as a family.

My best meal was at a (unfortunately now-closed) restaurant called The Dancing Pig; I had lamb short ribs with goat cheese potatoes and asparagus. Simply amazing.

Another meal I had there might come at a close second: Lamb shanks on asparagus and bits of baked potatoes. Probably the best baked potatoes -- or maybe it was like a dark cooked potato, can't recall -- that I've ever had; I usually hate baked potatoes, or whichever this was, but godDAMN, if this wasn't good.

I second the cheeseburger. The first few weeks of moving to Mexico, I'd gained 4 or so pounds from the burgers.Strangely, enough that's not my favorite dish.. Slices of turkey, with mash potatos and gravey, macaroni and cheese, with some sangria soda.

Probably the first time I ever had Mexican food (age of 20, amazingly) - it was like my tastebuds had never been used before, and the salt-rimmed Margaritas were a first too. It's never been quite as good since, but Mexican food is awesome.

One of the best meals I have ever had came from a japanese noodle shack in Soho, London. It was a kimchi ramen and was almost a religious experience! Kind of in the tradition of the film Tampopo I have since been on a quest to replicate the recipe and have never quite made it yet.

I had dinner twice after hiking out of the Grand Canyon at the age of sixteen. First it was steak and baked potato and vegetable, followed by desert, then a cheeseburger and fries. The food itself was probably only fair to middling, but we (my sister, aunt, and uncle) were absolutely famished, and very proud of what we'd accomplished.

The best dish I ever had was a mushroom risotto, at the Everest restaurant in Chicago for my parents' 50th anniversary. Uncommon mushrooms, small, delicate, and flavorful, on a cloud of perfectly tender rice, lightly bathed in Parmesan; each bite was like an out-of-body experience.

I dunno, this one's tricky, because I've had so much good food in my life. My Mom's homemade fudge; the falafel stand in Ann Arbor; the Kung Pao Tofu at a Chicago suburb Chinese restaurant; the only truly spicy enchiladas I've ever had, at a Mexican joint in Boulder; the most divine Baklava, just out of the oven, on the beach of a Greek island; countless hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Rome; stuffed pizzas with feta, garlic, and artichoke; my Dad's lattes and cappuccinos.